There is increasing need for better methods of data storage
and sharing between computers. Likewise, in order to accommodate the growing use
of mobile computing devices, there is increasing need to make consistent the
data to which these devices have access. It is impractical and inconvenient to
increase storage space on individual machines, as needed. Instead, wireless
storage central to all networked computers provides a more sensible option.
Conventional computer networks and systems connect via a hierarchy and
communicate through a hub or switch architecture; however, hubs and switches
suffer from bandwidth degradation resulting from the back plane speed of these
architectures.
Researchers at Arizona State University have invented a
novel architecture consisting of a wireless storage system and a supporting
agile network. The architecture allows for digital communication between
servers, storage devices and other devices. It offers a high availability
redundant mesh network capable of high-speed communication and agile
reconfiguration adaptable to existing network conditions. Meanwhile, redundant
paths and the ability to switch paths in milliseconds increase the reliability
of the mesh network and deliver bandwidth in excess of 1Gbps.
Potential Applications
Wireless Storage and Support Network is scalable and
flexible to allow use in various applications:
- General Data Communications Networks – general higher
data networks using storage frequently (i.e. multimedia processing clusters)
- Office/Corporate Networks – relieve the conventional
server systems with increased data speed
- Home Networks – managed storage despite changes in
personal computers
Benefits and Advantages
- Higher speed data retrieval - data delivery bandwidth in
excess of 1Gbps
- Flexible – soft assignment of disks or disk slices to
users (server computers)
- High Performance – performance improvement by response to
some SCSI communication from the local router rather than end-to-end;
end-to-end response only required for data delivery from server to disk or
from disk to server
- Low Cost – implementation with a low initial cost using a
scalable architecture Reliability
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